Irish Fourplay

"...something I once heard Charles M. Schulz say, 'Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.'"

 — William F. House

"Forewarned is four-armed."

— Folk saying

Today in Australia is February First, the feast of St. Bridget.  As several websites note, St. Bridget is a combination of Christian saint and Goddess figure... rather like St. Sara (patron saint of Gypsies, also known as Kali) or like Sara Pezzini in the classic TV series "Witchblade."

"Aww... Irish foreplay."

— Sara Pezzini in Witchblade, Episode 6

"Mighty in the gift of purity
She was pleasing unto the Bridegroom on high."

— Song of St. Bridget

"Brace yourself, Bridget."

— Definition of Irish foreplay

Saint Bridget's Cross: Four people can form this cross by joining hands as shown.  Of course, a Goddess like Kali (shown above) or Sara Pezzini could do it all by herself.

For futher details, see The Swastika Goddess,  the history of Jews and the Roman Catholic Church, and the history of Irish neutrality in World War II.

Postscript  of 11 PM —

The Goddess Bridget in Literature

The Goddess Bridget (or Brigid) is incarnated in two classic works of American literature —

• The American patriot and Communist Party supporter Dashiell Hammett gave an unflattering portrayal of Brigid (O'Shaughnessy) in The Maltese Falcon.  For a Jungian analysis of the relationship between Sam Spade and Brigid, see the perceptive remarks of Ryan Benedetti:

"In Jungian terms, Brigid becomes a projection of Spade's anima, a contrasexual replica of his own face as expressed in someone of the opposite sex.

Spade wears a variety of masks in his work. Masking allows him to get underneath the scam most clients lay on him. He is closer to the darker side of his unconscious than any of the other characters in the book, and he is so, because of his role as shamus. His function in his society is to expose all of the underlying darkness of the human psyche."

One way of looking at animus and anima is through the following archetypes:

A diamond and its dual "whirl" figure —
or a "jewel-box and its mate"

• 
  
  Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, describes the way Goddess Bridget (again, O'Shaughnessy) arranged the conveyance of her late husband to the next world:

 "D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?"

"Yes, madam."

"Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last rap the O'Flaherties can raise!"

John O'Hara's Birthday

"We stopped at the Trocadero and there was hardly anyone there.  We had Lanson 1926.  'Drink up, sweet.  You gotta go some.  How I love music.  Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August.  All languages.  A walking Berlitz.  Berlitz sounds like you with that champagne, my sweet, or how you're gonna sound.'"

— John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, Chapter 11, 1938

"And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."

— Acts, Chapter 2, Verse 4

"Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

PARIS,
1922-1939."

— James Joyce, conclusion of Finnegans Wake

"Using illustrative material from religion, myth, and culture, he starts with the descent of the dove on Jesus and ends with the poetic ramblings of James Joyce."

— Review of a biography of the Holy Spirit

Illustration added at 3:21 AM Feb. 3, 2003:

Firefall

Available for $220 from
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Poetic Justice:
The Peacock Throne

Yesterday was the death day of two proponents of Empire: George III (in 1820) and Robert Frost (in 1963).  Lord Byron argued that the King slipped through heaven's gate unobserved while a friend distracted St. Peter with bad poetry.  We may imagine, on this dark night of the soul, Frost performing a similar service.

Though poets of the traditional sort may still perform such services in Heaven, here on earth they have been superseded by writers of song lyrics.  An example, Roddy Frame (formerly of the group "Aztec Camera"), was born on yesterday's date in 1964.  A Frame lyric:

Transformed by some strange alchemy,*
You stand apart and point to me
And point to something I can't see....

— Back Door to Heaven         

Namely:

    The Back Door to Heaven    

For poetic purposes, we may think of surreptitious entry into Heaven as being conveniently accomplished through a portal like the above back door, which is that of a small hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

This is not your average Motel 6 back door.  As a former New York Times correspondent has written,

"Over the years, the guest list has drawn the likes of Prince Philip and the Shah of Iran, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But informality still reigns."

This small hotel (or its heavenly equivalent), whose gardens are inhabited by various exotic birds, including peacocks, may still be haunted by the late Shah, who apparently styled himself "King of Kings and Emperor of the Peacock Throne."  Of course, the ghost of the King of Kings, after entering the garden of Paradise, may not be able to resume his former human shape.  He might still, however, be among those greeted by his fellow Emperor, George III, with the famous words

"My Lords and Peacocks..."

*For more on alchemy and Cuernavaca, see
  my journal note "The Black Queen."

Inaugural Address for Cullinane College (undelivered):

The Prisoner

Cullinane College was scheduled to open its doors officially on January 29, 2003.  The following might have been an appropriate inaugural address.

From The Prisoner: Comments
 on the Final Episode, "Fall Out":

"When the President asks for a vote, he says: 'All in favor.' But he never asks for those opposed. (Though it appears that none will be opposed -- and though he says its a democratic assembly, it is hardly that. The President even says that the society is in a 'democratic crisis,' though without democracy present, it's just a sham.)

#48/Young Man sings 'Dry Bones,', which is his rebellion (notice its chaotic effect on 'society'). But then the song gets taken over, 'polished,' and sung by a voice-over (presumably set up by #1). Does this mean that society is stealing the thunder (i.e. the creative energy) of youth, and cheapening it, or does it mean that youth is just rebelling in the same way that their fathers did (with equal ineffectiveness)? Perhaps it is simply a comment on the ease with which society can deal with the real rebellion of the 1960's, which purported to be led by musicians; one that even the Beatles said was impossible in 'Revolution.'"

President: Guilty! Read the Charge!

#48 is guilty, of something, and then the society pins something on him."

The Other Side of the Coin

Excerpt from the poem that Robert Frost (who died on this date in 1963) meant to read at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy:

It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.

I greatly prefer Robinson Jeffers's "Shine, Perishing Republic":

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
    heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, 
    and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember....

See also the thoughts on Republic vs. Empire in the work of Alec Guinness (as Marcus Aurelius and as Obi-Wan Kenobi).

State of the Communion

Relevant readings:

• Definition of the communion of saints in the Catholic Encylopedia —
  

  
  

  "In that communion there is no loss of individuality, yet such an interdependence that the saints are 'members one of another' (Rom., xii, 5)...."



• Ephesians 4:16 —






"...the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth...."



• A Game Designer's Holy Grail —
  

  
  

  "Herman Melville described the exact process beautifully in his novel, Mardi:
  

  
  

  'In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne...'"



• Invitation to the HipBone Games —
  

  
  

  "...man is seen as he is sub specie aeternitatis, an 'immortal diamond.'"








• Your Hip Bone Connected —
  

  "Now hear the word of the Lord" 

As promised last December 6...

Leadbelly Under the Volcano

See also the obituary of John Browning, pianist, who died January 26.

Historical postscript: Huddie Ledbetter ("Leadbelly") was, according to some accounts, born on January 21, the date of Irene Diamond's death.  He died on December 6, the feast day of Saint Nicholas.

Our Town:
No There There?

Paul Newman, scheduled for his last performance in "Our Town" today, said in 1961:

"With that fifteen hundred, I could have beat him. That's all I needed Charlie...You'd love to keep me hustlin' for ya, huh, wouldn't ya? I mean, a couple more years with me scufflin' around, in them little towns and those back alleys, you might make yourself enough to get a little pool room back in Oakland - six tables and a handbook on the side...Lay down and die by yourself."

— Fast Eddie Felson in "The Hustler"

For another view of Oakland, see

Super Bowl XXXVII Live!

Gertrude Stein on Oakland, California:

"There is no there there."

Well, maybe a little pool room....

Steps

John Lahr on a current production of "Our Town":

"The play's narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase 'deus ex machina' a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role. God should look like Newman: lean, strong-chinned, white-haired, and authoritative in a calm and unassuming way—if only we had all been made in his image!"

— The New Yorker, issue of Dec. 16, 2002

On this date in 1971, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, died. 

"Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful....

First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn't work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director....

When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed....

We were now at Step Three."

— Alcoholics Anonymous, also known as "The Big Book," Chapter 5 

Postscript of 5:15 AM, after reading the following in the New York Times obituaries:

"Must be a tough objective," says Willie to Joe as they huddle on the side of a road, weapons ready. "Th' old man says we're gonna have th' honor of liberatin' it."

"The old men know when an old man dies." 

— Ogden Nash

After the Dream:

  A sequel to the previous note,
"Through a Soda-Fountain Mirror, Darkly"

From John Lahr's recent review of "Our Town":

"We all know that something is eternal," the Stage Manager says. "And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings." 

The conclusion of Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking Glass:

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream --
Lingering in the golden gleam --
Life, what is it but a dream?

An apt setting for a realistic production of "Our Town" would be Randolph, N.Y., a rather timeless place that a few years ago even had a working soda fountain of the traditional sort.  Yesterday's note was prompted in part by an obituary of a young girl who attended St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Randolph.

This is the reason for tonight's site music, "After a Dream," by Fauré.

See also Piper Laurie's recent film, St. Patrick's Day.

Through a Soda-Fountain Mirror, Darkly

For Piper Laurie on Her Birthday

"He was part of my dream, of course —
but then I was part of his dream, too!"

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter XII ("Which Dreamed It?") quoted as epigraph to a script for the film Pleasantville, which features a soda fountain from the 1950's.

"Scenes from yesteryear are revisited through the soda-fountain mirror, creating such a fluid pathway between the past and present that one often becomes lost along the way."

— Caroline Palmer's review of "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" 

The above quotations are related to the 1952 film Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, in which James Dean makes a brief appearance at a 1920's soda fountain. The film is chiefly notable for displaying the beauty of Piper Laurie, but a subplot is also of iterest.  Charles Coburn, a rich man visiting incognito a timeless town* rather like Pleasantville or Riverdale, takes up painting and is assisted by the young Gigi Perreau, who, as I recall, supplies him with the frame from a Circe Soap ad displayed in a shop window.

For more on a fictional rich character and Circe — indeed, enough for a soap — see my note of January 11, 2003, "The First Days of Disco," and the sequel of January 12, 2003, "Ask Not."  In the manner of magic realism, the adventures in the earlier entry of Scrooge McDuck and Circe are mirrored by those in the later entry of C. Douglas Dillon and Monique Wittig.

For a less pleasant trip back in time, see the later work of Gigi Perreau in Journey to the Center of Time (1967).  One viewer's comment:

This is the worst movie ever made. I don't want to hear about any of Ed Wood's pictures. This is it, this is the one. Right here. The bottom of the deepest pit of cinema hell.

Happy birthday, Miss Laurie.

*Rather, in fact, like "Our Town."  Here is John Lahr on a current production of that classic:

"The play's narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase 'deus ex machina' a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role. God should look like Newman: lean, strong-chinned, white-haired, and authoritative in a calm and unassuming way—if only we had all been made in his image!"

— The New Yorker, issue of Dec. 16, 2002

If Newman is God, then Miss Laurie played God's girlfriend.  Nice going, Piper.